occasionally bombarding the headquarters in an irregular manner

March 13, 2013

'the priest was murdered sometime later'

UPDATE 14/3: The claim that the new Pope hid political prisoners in his holiday home on behalf of the Agentinian armed forces has now been retracted. I'm still interested in what he did during the dirty war, though.

The news
that the new pope apparently helped the Argentine junta hide some of the people
it ‘disappeared’ sends me back to A State of Fear, Andrew Graham-Yooll’s great
account of Argentina’s dirty war:

The priest
was murdered sometime later. He was dragged out of his bed and shot in
underclothes in a field in front of the church. Government sources let it be
known that he was suspected of being a counsellor for leftists and that as a
member of the Third World Priests Movement he had aided guerrillas by preaching
subversion. Death in any form is undignified: the lack of dignity seems even
greater when death comes in underclothes in a field full of rusty tins and
hedge clippings.

Clearly, It was the
wrong time to advocate a ‘preferential option for the poor’, as the saying used
to go. On the other side, Graham-Yooll notes that another priest of his
acquaintance, an air force chaplain, said that actions such as the above were
part of the ‘crusade against evil’ that everyone should ‘pray for the
government’s victory’ and that the blood shed by military death squads would ‘cleanse
Argentina.’ Other priests badgered the condemned into
confessing before their eventual execution after however many weeks or months
of torture.

The new Pope’s
actions seem to put him closer to the second camp than the first. Not knowing
more, it seems unlikely to me that he was an ideological fellow traveller if
only because I don’t think an ultramontane headbanger would have made it to
Pope, not least because part of the politics behind his election surely
involves bolstering South American Catholicism against inroads by evangelical
Protestant groups. Another thing Graham-Yooll makes clear is that the way the
junta went about its business was designed to terrorise the population into
compliance, in which objective it largely succeeded. The future Pope Francis
may have acted mainly out of fear. Anyway, he’s got some popesplaining to do.